We spent the day in Oxford which was very nice, albeit quite cold. The result was a headache that required some rest and a warm green tea to recover from. After that I went on and implemented the first file system access command in my USB host replacement project, after hooking an SDHC to the development circuit: DIR. The screenshot below illustrates the result of such development:

USB host replacement – DIR command implementation with long file name support

What you see in the screenshot above is exactly what the Commodore 64 is going to receive through the user port. USBhost-64 provides the very same sort of information for the USB flash drive attached to it, however it does NOT support long file names.

Other commands I need to implement are those for opening files for reading/writing and consequently read/write data from/to them. I’ll also implement a “change dir” command to navigate sub-folders. Again, this interface is so generic that as medium I can use pretty much anything external to the C64, without changing the drivers I wrote to interact with USBhost-64 🙂

At this rate I will be designing the PCB in a matter of days instead of months… Benchmark testing is the only thing that can slow me down before that’s done 😀